Security, BI and skills top IT priorities for CIOs

Emerging technologies like mobility and cloud computing, along with concerns about traditional issues of security, Business Intelligence, including Big Data, and skills development, are exercising the minds of Australia’s CIOs and IT decision-makers as the top priorities to tackle in their businesses.

The top IT business priority is security but the emerging trend of mobility now outranks ICT spending reduction, and is viewed by CIOs as a critical priority.

In new findings from research of the Australian ICT market, research firm Telsyte, CIOs and IT decision makers are placing emerging technologies like mobility and cloud computing on their list of top IT business priorities in addition to the traditional “pain points” of security, business intelligence (including big data) and skills development.

Telsyte says that mobility, ahead of ICT spending reduction, is the top priority for nine percent of the 800 CIOs and IT decision-makers interviewed, with 21 per cent deeming it “critical”, while BI and skills development are seen as critical priorities by 11 and 10 per cent of CIOs respectively.

Telsyte senior analyst and CIO program lead, Rodney Gedda, says IT leaders have often rated security, BI, skills and other concerns like IT-business alignment and innovation as high on their list of priorities, but going into 2013 as emerging technologies become mainstream, their priorities are also changing.

“With mobility in the top five of critical priorities, CIOs are responding to demands from the business as well as a mobile-empowered workforce and this will only increase in 2013,” Gedda says.

“Cloud computing is now viewed as a higher priority than IT infrastructure upgrades and unified communications.”

Gedda said these latest findings would be followed by more findings with the launch of the Telsyte Business Technology Strategy (BTS) CIO subscription program.

He said the new program was an Australian-focused IT research resource available online and on-demand, which provided 24x7 access to more than 500 research data points on the use of IT within Australian enterprises, and could be used for decision support information, ICT strategy and planning, IT education, and insights to keep up with emerging technologies.

According to Gedda, whether CIOs are looking at ways to streamline business processes or negotiating better deals with vendors, they can use Telsyte’s local IT research to their advantage, by keeping up with new products and services, benchmarking their internal IT operations and for negotiating better deals.

Gedda said the main coverage areas of the BTS program, available to CIOs for an annual subscription including analyst advisory time, were infrastructure and cloud, enterprise communications, applications and software, workforce mobility, IT security, end-user computing, enterprise social media and IT services and management.

“The online portal provides searchable, unique Australian data available on-demand to facilitate internal decision support, ICT strategy and planning, IT education, and insights to keep up with emerging technologies.”

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Peter Dinham is a co-founder of iTWire and a 35-year veteran journalist and corporate communications consultant. He has worked as a journalist in all forms of media – newspapers/magazines, radio, television, press agency and now, online – including with the Canberra Times, The Examiner (Tasmania), the ABC and AAP-Reuters. As a freelance journalist he also had articles published in Australian and overseas magazines. He worked in the corporate communications/public relations sector, in-house with an airline, and as a senior executive in Australia of the world’s largest communications consultancy, Burson-Marsteller. He also ran his own communications consultancy and was a co-founder in Australia of the global photographic agency, the Image Bank (now Getty Images).